CLUTTER, 34

SEVENTEEN



A possible genesis: from the murky vault of my memory I can produce an incident that could expose all my subsequent ills to the light of day, give them a pattern, a delicate explanatory weave we can lightly trace with the tip of the index finger like a finely wrought spider’s web.


What a fraud the world is! Can the etiology of my ills really be reduced to the following banal story of childhood? A cliche schoolyard tale that once revealed, is torn apart like a holiday turkey ceaselessly, monotonously, picked from the bone, in an annual orgy. Would it, could it be that simple? It all began with a gross overstatement, an amplification of a promise to promote security and confidence and trust, that backfired, producing the opposite character traits… that ended in…


Mother again. Sweet, beautiful, ruinous Mother. She is wearing a cotton summer dress with a floral pink pattern. As I walked beside her, her peppermint fragrance was my protective cloud. Her slim wrists and tiny hands were holding my miniature six year old hand. When I leaned far enough to the right, I could brush against her thigh, my hand could dangle against her firm calf. But she would constantly hoist me upright, lever my arm to get me to stand up straight and continue the march toward the nursery school.


The nursery school was a spatiophobic’s daymare. Everyday it swarmed with different mealy-mouthed children. There was no opportunity to develop respectable, repeatable patterns and rhythms. Everyday I was expected to change with the prevailing conditions. Even at so tender and unformed an age, the open-endedness of the nursery resounded hollow and dull in my cavernous head. Moving from table to table, activity to activity, each motion drenched with meaning and choice, made young Langley Vandemark freeze with decision dread.


My mother was sure to give me, everyday without fail, a wad of handkerchiefs for my perpetually runny noise. I packed the handkerchiefs in a tight bundle and bunched it in my pocket and pretended it was a turtle. It was my turtle, hidden away, given to me by my dear, sweet, trustful mother; a turtle, a creature that carries its simple home on its back was the fitting metaphor for my Vandemark microcosm.


I’m fussing. Mother tugged at me gently.


“Now Langley, you’re not to fuss.”


“But I don’t want to leave you Momma. I want to marry you. Are you really gonna wait outside for me?”


“Yes, Langley, I never go home. I always wait outside for you. And you can’t marry me I’m married already.”


I was in the big room, sitting at a table cutting large hearts from red construction paper. It was Valentine’s Day. It was for Mother. But the day outside was unseasonably warm. A bright sun, perfectly illuminating the world so that every absence could be noted (the perfect sun to illuminate a primal loss), blared down like house lights in a theatre.


We children were marshaled out into the cobbled schoolyard. The school yard was a featureless escarpment with unimpeded, views of the surrounding neighborhood for fantastic mile after fantastic mile. Young Langley squinted into that awful white illumination. Fearful Langley surveyed the scene as tears rolled down his puffy cheeks. She was not there. She was not by the lamppost. She was not standing on the trolley platform. She was not in the tobacco shop where she supposedly bought me chocolates. She was nowhere to be found. The street was empty.


Like all scenes of primal loss this moment was not without its mythological import. A creepy, uneven shadow crept across the uptown city-scape. What exactly was happening here? A presence seemed to leave the world, a presence largely benign. What replaced it was a shadow entity. An idea that perhaps there was more to my narrative self than I am revealing; a shadow entity lurking in the crevices, stoking me to the gills with pathologies that are not my birthright. A parallel track that is strangely akin to mine yet wholly divorced and alien. It crawls along at the margins and demands a portion of a patrimony that belongs to him and to him alone, the nasty fraud!


Eventually, Young Langley, reduced to near hysterics, is segregated from the other children. He was kept aside and monitored, with the hopes that he will calm down.


Eventually he did, of course, but a slight flutter was introduced into an otherwise simple system of checks and balances. Mother was no longer a unitary creature of unalloyed love and worthiness. From this conclusion a simple analogy was constructed: if mother is flickering and unstable then the world cannot exist on a solid foundation. If the world does not exist on a solid foundation then the world may not exist or may exist in several senses. The flickering life began.


“I was out buying you chocolates, Langley, that’s why I wasn’t there.”


Ah, yes, and it was true. Chocolates always awaited me when beautiful Mother, her pale blue eyes glistening with love and tender recognition as she picked me out of the crowd of pre-schoolers for the leisurely walk to the brownstone.

And then, once home, the handkerchief turtle became yet another square of white cloth again, and the world became a uniform, wonderfully bland globe of undifferentiated love, acceptance and deception. But the crack was there: focus in on young six year old Langley and you could see the fine fissure running from the small of his back up and around his waist until it halts somewhere near his sternum, that inadequate plate of bone that is supposed to protect the heart, which is erroneously described as the seat of emotions.

CLUTTER, 32

Or shift to the daylight realm and take Rhonda Boule a little before the war. I was twenty-five, she, a tender twenty-one or two. She was one of those marvelously adaptive young women one encountered before the war who does not get much press.

She emigrated from some grid-plan capital city of some spacious Midwestern state, settling down in New York for vague aesthetic and professional motivations. She lived alone, on her own income, frugally but with a certain flashy style.

She decorated her single room Murray Hill apartment with baubles won for her from brawny, brainless beaus on hot summer’s evenings at Coney Island amusement concessions. Stiff maroon animals stuffed with unpliable saw dust sat impassively on a small shelf; a marksmanship trophy stuffed with wax apples rested on the lip of the window sill; a diorama of a bowling alley, decorated with colorfully painted, minature bowlers, the paint, distractingly enough, unevenly applied and skewed during mass production: the bowler’s facial features dripping on a collar, or a flesh colored paint snaking up a sleeve.



Rhonda herself held her firm sturdy, corn fed body upright from mere youthfulness alone. Everything that would eventually sag from weight and persistent gravity was tight and round with a certain solid, symmetrical configuration. She had auburn hair with jet black roots, a shinning button nose that she constantly dulled with granulated white talcum powder. She rouged her half apple cheeks and applied bright primary colored lipstick to her broad honey sweet lips as if it was erotic war paint or she was eros’ medicine man.


Taking a mid-town subway on a summer night (for it was a summer romance, and so all the more heartbreaking in its pathos: it is speckled in my memory with late day hazy humid sunshine beneath the dusty Norway maples of Murry Hill. It is sound tracked by the sudden after work cessation of traffic of bustling mid-town; it is scented by the ozone humid detumesence that follows a brief summer shower.)


Take a look at strapping me in my white summer suit, some kind of profusion of posies in my mitts, striding up the subway steps two at a time, bright floral tie flapping out of my seersucker, light straw hat perched high on my oblong Vandemark pate, joyful because I’m at a fork and I haven’t chosen a path yet, gleeful because I can see my life cleaving in two, forming parallel paths after they separate from a single stubborn point… and I’m dawdling; I am savoring the sensation of my own lassitude.

If life wants to force me to show my hand (and it has that power, it reserves that right, of course), then I can be petulantly playful as I lower my cards. I can savor the dread as fate awaits even the slightest twitch of my globular hands.


She is unstrapping her garter belt and removing her stockings. She is folding her girdle neatly over a wooden chair. Her deflated dress dangles from a wire hanger just over her vanity mirror. She sits perched on her wicker stool, rounded buttocks spilling over the leather confines, forming pleasant roundlets, and brushing her hair repeatedly, fifty strokes for each side of her evenly parted straight hair.

Soon that hair will spread out in wild sprays on the pillow when we make love. I stand behind her running my hands over her pale shoulders, occasionally cupping her prodigious breasts. She squirms, letting out peels of girlish laughter. Her reflective, imitation, immature little girl blue green eyes sparkle at me from the mirror, approving and disapproving in gorgeous simultaneity all of my naughty forays.


I will marry this plump little girl. Her firm baby fat body will incubate as many robust Vandemark’s as eggs she posess and sperm I can implant. And I will don a suit, and ride the subway downtown. And in the gray-green twilight I descend in the elevator and ride the careening subway uptown. And mundanely, she will be there, baby-fat more mature, less firm, surrounded by a brood of children. I will eat and drink, urinate and defecate, age and work, reproduce myself and die.


I let my hand drop from Rhonda’s broad shoulder. It is late at night. I look out the window and see the line of cars stopped at a red light on Madison Avenue. The light turns and the cars surge ahead to the next set of lights that turn red almost immediately.


I finished. I lay on the bed exhausted. Rhonda snuggles up and kisses my lips. Her heavy breasts pressing against my forearm. I can feel dead-weight on my brain for the first time in my twenty-five years. I realized, as those soft hands gropped about my body, that possible worlds were a cruel lie and impossible duty for a man whose vision was not just a keen twenty-twenty, but supernaturally acute --- from that point on I would use all my weight to halt forward progress.


As I rode Rhonda’s elevator down and pushed the sliding door, its rotating plates of glass glittering in the morning sun and stepped heavy footed and certain unto the terra firma of Madison Avenue, I knew that I would never marry that plump, solid, loving, perfectly acceptable girl.

I would never look back (and I did not, until now). The garters would hang limply on the chair, the bra would be slung over the vanity mirror, but some other man would leave a depression in the bed next to Rhonda after he rose to go to work. Some other man would stand stiffly down the aisle as a veiled Rhonda, donned in virginal white, took the somber teary stroll on her father’s arm. She would lock in her future with a certitude I could never dream of; she would never balk at the crossroad when it came. She would make the ontologically sound choice. She was not, after all, a Vandemark.

CLUTTER, 11

SEVEN



… When I came back from the war I felt a tumbling sensation. I would often check the ground beneath my feet to make sure that the soil of Harlem was still the stable platform it had been in 1942.

I began to realize that the finely wrapped layers of my psyche were being stripped away, torn asunder and trampled upon. When I came home from the war things and symbols could no longer be so easily teased apart. I could no longer choose, with the certainty that I always possessed, between two mutually exclusive and polar opposites.

When I came home from the war I NEVER wanted to let my guard down. I peered from around the corner and looked at the little hollow spaces I had fashioned for myself and was amazed at the incongruity between the created and the natural, the soul and the body, my bulk versus Homer’s wisp. …


Potentiality: my mother, a petite woman much younger than Father, always smelled vaguely of peppermint soap on her thin wrists. She would take Homer and I by the hand and go with Father to Grand Central Station to see him off to various medical conferences, (whose attendance, it seems, was mandatory), in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, even St. Louis. Of course I realized later that he never left New York.

He always insisted that we go home immediately on hugging him beneath that vast roof, the smoky light filtering through the upper windows of that beautiful nexus of embarkation and departure that says, in so many profound and significant ways, that there is no such thing as humanity, but humanity in process and in transformation. Once Mother, Homer and I boarded a subway uptown he would bid a hasty retreat downtown, to the other woman.


Father had an unchallenging medical practice mid-town. He had time to spare, and that combined fatally with the fact that he was the type of man who forty years ago women found irresistibly attractive: he was older than his appearance, even in photographs in his early twenties during his residency. His temples were already spotted with gray hair; the lines on his face had deepened appreciatively: grooves beneath his mournful, pale blue eyes, scorings on his broad forehead, and light crows feet in the transverse angles of his eyes.

He was unusually tall, even taller than me, an odd enough occurrence for Americans who tend to sprout an inch or two taller than their progenitors. He had long, lanky limbs, narrow, slender shoulders and remained wiry and robust all his days. And the last I saw of him, he was standing, framed as it were, in the doorway of his and Mother’s bedroom.


I was perched on the staircase, my body just below his line of sight, only the top most portion of my head and my beedy eyes jutting above the lavender runner on the flat step of the last stair of the marble stairway. He was distinguished looking, attired in some sort of dark evening suit.


Mother was just out of view in the interior of the bedroom. I could picture her with minute detail in my mind: she is in bed, white night cap perched low over her fragile brow, wisps of blond hair spilling out of the cap, a wrap around night gown closed tightly over her slim shoulders, pale, tired, perhaps one of her reoccurring migraines beginning an introductory salvo of stabbing, throbbing pain in her right temple.


“But Edgar do you really need to go out and take a house call this late at night?”


“Yes, dear, I told you this particular patient is extremely ill.”


“But can’t one of your associates make the call? One of the younger doctors?”


“No darling, I’m afraid its out of the question. This case is particularly difficult and I need to go. I have to give this woman my individual attention.”


There was silence.


“Darling, I can’t predict when or with what frequency my patients will become ill.” More silence. Father was looking in Mother’s general direction, and I imagine she was turning over in the canopied bed, lifting the quilt and tapering the edges around her slim neck. Father rapidly turned toward the stairway. I hid behind a hamper left by our careless maid on the landing.


Slipping out the door I turned to the left and spied Father’s retreating figure walking at a brisk pace toward midtown. He was not taking a cab. He was not riding the subway. I followed him at a safe distance, pacing myself, placing visual obstacles between us.

CLUTTER, 6

3

Do not listen to anybody who says the contrary, the world was once an achingly simpler place. I recall, with the clarity of a vision, when every action I took seemed to be invested with honey rich meaning.

Today, when every human step seems decidedly ad-hoc, it is a leap of imagination to fancy a world drenched in signification. But it was so. I know I existed in a web of meaning. I understood my little corner of Fifth Avenue and 123rd Street as if nature’s god had bequeath to me, instead of eyes, some piece of scientific equipment which placed the world in hyper focus.

I could view the cracks in bricks of the sidewalk as if they were canyons. I could see the individual granules of city dust peppered on maple leaves. And if things grew dim over time it was less my doing, and more the swirl of the outside world, with its creeping gray tones and its looming smothering sands, invading a space that was once a private, settled, and cozy nook where meaning was not exhaustively searched for, but simply grasped and pocketed like a prized marble.

If you believe that all of this is not possible perhaps it is because it is like all difficult conceptual problems, the real devil is not in the details but in the arrangement of the details. The real problem is not how Chance throws down our cards, but how we take them and arrange them to suit our designs. For what good is a world if it is not fit for us to live in? Why would anyone live among a heap of broken objects? Transformation rules the day.



I clearly recall, with a gauzy haze similar to the ring of smoke used at the margins of cinema cameras when depicting the nostalgic past, being taken by my Uncle to the piers on the East River several blocks from our house. Uncle Albert Vandemark, one of the Hudson River Valley Vandemarks, looked upon our city habits with disdain. He felt, and it may very well be true, that city life led to degeneracy and effeminacy in men. He believed it was his duty to stave the flow of passivity that was rendering the Vandemark limbs useless, dull, atrophied.


So Uncle and Nephew would proudly tramp down to the docks, towels in hand, to where the East River forms a small nick in the island of Manhattan, and where, according to local legend, a shanty of freed Slaves once had settled north of muddy Old New Amsterdam.

Once there, Uncle Albert would disrobe to his bright bumble bee yellow and black swimming trunks. They fit his massive bulk snugly; his rounded loins protruded from his crotch. The bumblebee black rings that circled his arms and waist gave him the appearance of a man that was about to burst from his seams. I slinked out of my youthful shorts and shirt and stood passively watching my gargantuan Uncle.

All around us various urchins who worked the streets as petty vendors, newsboys, and hawkers of rags, were plunging into the river, cannon balling and diving into the placid, warm green waters. Uncle and I would swim beyond the confusion and I would receive the rudimentary instructions in long-term survival swimming. He taught me how to inflate my clothes by tying the ends of shirt and pant legs into knots, creating buoyant floatation devices that looked like puffed, bloated corpses; how to alternate swimming strokes to prevent fatigue; how to discern, from wind and cloud patterns, the direction of land.

All the while Uncle Albert’s voice would boom instructions, correcting mistakes, making reproofs, admonishments, all above the din of ships in the not so distant channel, and the splashing and screams of innumerable little boys that had never heard the word adolescence, let alone lived it. We would swim back, my paternalistic Uncle doing the backstroke, his yellow face puffing and spewing water --- what did he know about our family? What did he think would become of me?


We strolled back from the docks in the summer Harlem twilight. Somewhere in New York Harbor a German U-Boat periscope was peeking above the calm August water and focusing, even so briefly, on our retreating figures, before concentrating on American shipping efforts during the mid-days of the Great War.

An Italian with a busy haywire mustache was hawking ice cream from a pushcart near our corner. I could smell the soft aroma of polluted water on my quickly drying tight skin and hear overhead the clatter of pans and pots shifting about in kitchens in the rows of abutting brownstones.


We stopped at our brownstone. Uncle Albert sat on the stoop and watched some of the colored people that were moving into the neighborhood strolling down the street. They were well-dressed men and women, boys and girls, in summer suits and bright floral dresses, outside to enjoy the evening breeze. Albert looked on with evident scorn. Behind us a shade rustled. My uncle looked at the movement out of the corner of his eye and again twisted his face in scorn, but this time with a touch of anguish.

My brother Homer was looking out the window of his room. Homer’s eyes were growing sensitive by this time, so he spent most of his days indoors, only furtively glancing out the window. We were so close in age and appearance that many people mistook us for twins. Except while I grew robust and broad, Homer stayed narrow and slim. He was such a perfect inversion of my character that we dovetailed at key junctures ---- we both pursued our own ends with such a singular purpose and catastrophic intensity that in the end we were destined to meet alone, on a silent plain, where the distended parts of our psyches fit into snug ball and socket joints.

But first there were days of blissful differentiation, of Uncle Albert and me, of Mother and Father, or me bobbing up and down in a slick green ribbon of water, and of Homer. The dissolution of the Union, for better or worse, came much later.

CLUTTER, 3

I also realized that a certain strength came from the bottom; for to be on top is a mixed and partial blessing. As a white man nothing stands between you and success in the world but your own naked ambition. All that prevents your entry into material Valhalla is your ability to manipulate a system designed for your success and inculcated with your values.

If you are white and push a broom in Pierpont Morgan’s Library, and the Morgan himself ponderously strides past your small pile of gathering dust --- the only thing that separates him from you is the chasm of your own ineptitude. For Sex and Class can be concealed beneath the gentle facade of manners and subtle courtesies, but race stares you unforgivingly in the face. You can hide your mulatto children on tobacco road, but you can never pretend that you ushered them into the world with the same boons you bestowed onto your plantation wife’s offspring.



I often wonder what would have happened to me if our family had remained Negroes? Would two glaring eyes be peering out of a dark maze? Would limbs continue to grow unchecked?




A particular: this is all correct, in a certain sense. But I could never escape the spatial urge when crafting my creations, the apt metaphor of building a house. I can never resist the impulse to build those areas most heavily trafficked with the most elegant of structures and furnishings, even if, from the restricted realm of truth, they are not the most important. The load-bearing zone may reside in some unused attic or some musty basement. I could easily usher you past my formal sitting room and show you the misshapen gnome that I hide away in the garret room above the stairs, but wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the Empire chair I’ve fashioned for you near the roaring hearth? We can ignore the traffic on Fifth Avenue, bleating outside our window and concentrate on what really matters, what is fundamentally important? For there is a great deal that needs to be ignored. A selective and editing eye will be our fussy host. For natural selection works not only in nature but in memory. For just as the white moth that recently lived in a forest of pale birches, whose trees suddenly and unfortunately are transformed to black from some natural catastrophe, so it is with human memory: what survives survives because of its usefulness: (and narrative is memory’s triage!)


The grand scope, the overarching vision, has no place in a family reunion. In families things must, narrow and close-cropped. Not every stone should be overturned. All that is necessary is focus and blur… focus and then blur…




Focus in: my family, take them for all in all, had their racial smudge, this genetic stammer. Personally, I always thought we could have considered it a feather in our cap, but no one in the family shared my views about our African ancestry, or at least never verbalized it to me. Instead, they sat serenely in stuffy parlors making fancy embroidery, or trotted over to Columbia or went up to Harvard to study law or medicine, and somehow forgot how dangerous it is to try and stand firmly on an uneven foundation. For nothing aggravates a case of historical vertigo quite so much as inadequate amnesia, or the erroneous notion that one’s head is as sound as a bell when you can see the crack, when you can hear the faulty resonance in cast bronze


And then there were all those portraits of father’s family that seemingly illustrated that we were white, that we were an old Dutch family from the Hudson River valley (Were we? Were we!?). But one need only do what I did when I came of age and my faculties became sufficiently acute: sidle up to them and think white and they are white; then, after a period of latency, sidle up again and think black and they become black. I realized, many years before I read Twain’s Puddin’Head Wilson that race is a Rorschach test. That at the margins and creeping toward the center it is as malleable as silly-puddy.



Blurring out, panning beyond, grasping at a universal, what could I do, having this questionable ancestral load to carry, but move on and pretend that none of it ever happened? That was the Vandemark philosophy. We had distilled this liquid until it was a fine jelly eager for consumption. We sported a stiff upper lip stoicism that was pure hollow poise. It was perfect rot. For behind the facade was a Poe like decay, a disillusionment that precipitated a slide to nothingness.

My family would sometimes whisper its secrets, but so much was contradictory and mutually exclusive. No one told anyone anything except in groups of two --- a wise policy, since it prevents factions, always a danger in a family with dark skeletons in their closets. For me it added impetus to enterprise when investigating for some sort of cohesion, some way to pick up the pieces and find the Ariadne thread out of the maze. My family never had the firm grounding that I wanted it to possess. I wanted it to cough up its secrets while I held its neck at the choke point.


…I thought, one fateful late November day that I had the clue, that I had found the secret ember that could, in a sense, light the fuse and explode the safe door, and reveal, to my eager eyes moist with tears of frustration, its hidden content….


But the War stopped my investigations.


One may as well begin here:


When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor I leaped from the porch of our Harlem brownstone and sprinted to the recruiting station. I was too old to enlist in the regular Army, so I left in frustration. But a day later I used certain family connections to pull strings and get on the fast track to a commission. Some chits were called in, some promises were made on late night telephones to smoky offices, chewing the fat and calling in old debts to corpulent family friends. In a week I was down in cradle Dixie for my inadequate training.


By early the next year I was on a ship creeping snailwise across the North Atlantic for England. We were taking a northerly route not to save time, but because of the ice floes (unusually strong that year) and the constant threat of U Boats (who were getting their cross hairs trained for the anticipated west-east transfer of Warehouse America to Airstrip England) we were at sea for weeks. The boat rolled and pitched on black, unforgiving waves, and I sat, nestled in my cabin berth, piling up crates of rations against the row of unusually wide port holes, for they gave me a continual view of the broken black landscape of pitching waves, and caused, for the first time in my relatively serene and optimistic life, to doubt that Order existed in the Cosmos, and to entertain that perhaps Disorder ruled the weary day.


And I got, on that crossing,  an oddly prescient view of what would happen after the war, of what would occur when America would no longer be a Crusading Nation. It would be forced to turn back into herself and realize, quite to her dismay, that her house was not in order. For what was worse than a nation that had to turn back greedily into herself: no more Indians to defeat, frontiers to conquer, Dixie to reconstruct, Japs to subdue. What would we do with a nation that was complete?

It is easy to be derailed on this front: the pain of being complete is a far worse a penalty than the curse of incompleteness. Promise is better than fulfillment and the race more exciting than the trophy loving cup. With nothing to do, where would we put our hands as we stand around the water cooler?


I worried for myself as well. A certain self-serving element existed in my nail biting woes. My ‘taint’ could easily be discovered by some Puddin’head Wilsonian character and then where would I be in the New World Order? I knew, or at least I surmised, that strict taxonomy would be demanded, a new purity, a new drive toward distinction, would mark that bright future day.


By the time our gray little ship came in sight of England, the storm serge had lost its height. The sea was a placid steel gray, so I slunk out onto the deck.


Britannica hung low over the horizon: a series of blue black hills with a ring of dingy mist hovering overhead. I gripped the cold rusted steel of the railing and looked down at the sparkling reflections of my golden-cuff links. Then, as my eyes moved into hyper focus, I imagined myself inhabiting a small, self-contained world within those cuffs --- complete, crystalline in its brightness, glimmering in purity --- and I wondered, as those blue gray hills began to show more details (a candy cane red and white colored light house on a black rock, a clutter of square shaped houses lining the harbor, laid out like haphazardly arranged packing crates) why open spaces gave me the atavistic urge to burrow into the earth. Not from anything so banal as agoraphobia (for despite local Harlem lore, I am not eccentric or insane, but a man who has laid each cognitive brick that composes the structure of his life with great care --- with careful self-consciousness) but from a simple metaphysical stance: unity is a better, more solid state than disunity; singularity a more primal, more fixed point of reference than multiplicity.

And the world produces multiplicity from its multifarious parts with the singular insistence of a flower spewing millions of uncountable grains of pollen in the spring tide air. Simply put, proliferation is king in our world! Spawning and living, dying and decaying, and time, that ceaseless metronome, making us keep pace, and all the loss… the loss…


We disembarked at the English port of Swansea. In 1942 Channel ports were still too dangerous for weakly armored ships like ours, so I had to endure a grueling twelve hour train ride from Swansea to Cardiff, and then a ferry to Bristol, a transfer to a cattle car at Reading, and finally, a slow conveyance to London.


England was a bewildering tangle; the civilian and the military were separated by the thinnest of lines, so trains, cars, boats, planes were constantly appropriated at the last minute. Often a gaggle of gray, listless people were left stranded on a rural station platform in the rain. A peace-time four hour ride was stretched like taffy by the Gods of War into a twelve hour daymare of transfers both missed and abandoned, accidents, unforeseen and in retrospect avoidable.

CLUTTER, 2

Being older than Homer, and able to stand on my own, Mother, upon reaching the steps of our brownstone, plucked me out of the carriage first, setting me nimbly down on the third step of the stoop. I bobbed up and down, impatient and ornery.

I strutted about the step, making various animal noises I had learned: the gentle cooing of the pigeons that perched and roosted outside my window, their multi-colored, luminous feathers a counterpoint to the dull, dun colored stalagmite droppings they deposited on the stone rain shelf. The yap-yap of the ferocious dachshund that Mrs. Schultz, our next-door neighbor, would walk in the wee hours of the morning, when the little runt encountered a larger dog. The plaintive howl of the neighborhood cat, Lady Elizabeth, when she was in heat, rubbing her hindquarters suggestively on the wrought iron railing that delineated the sidewalk from the front yard. I rendered this veritable Ark of animal noises in high strutting fashion, like a solider on dress parade, legs marching in prancing, exaggerated goose steps, arms swinging demonically at my sides.



Halfway through my martial calisthenics, Mother freed Homer from the carriage.


“Look at your brother, Homer,” she said with pride, “he’s going to be a solider some day.” Homer cooed in response, a soft, understated pigeon trill. “He’s going to be a great solider. A great officer, like his grandfather, my father, who fought at Antietam. Twenty-thousand men fell on that awful day. But my Daddy survived,” she told Homer proudly and then looked my way, casting an appraising glance, “I think your brother is made of the same stuff as Daddy.”


Later I learned that maternal Grandfather Franklin Pierce Rogerson was a comparatively lucky survivor of the Battle of Antietam.


He was a captain in the New York 41st Regiment out of Cold Spring Harbor, and it was his first commission, his first trip south, and indeed his first trip outside of the State of New York. He was one of those green officers sent to the field with inadequate training. His Sergeant was the de facto commander and Grandfather Rogerson would quietly seek his advice on almost all matters, and the Sergeant was enough of a solider by trade to never break ranks and show that he was the true authority over all those young Cold Spring Harbor boys, all those oystermen’s sons, who were better at holding shell rakes in their hands than firearms, and who tooled around in the sheltered bays and coves of the Long Island Sound, whose gentle lapping waters, although salt, sometimes froze over in winter.


But a storm was unleashed at Antietam, and Grandfather Rogerson marched bravely forth into the field, his service revolver in one hand, his upraised sword in the other, his Sergeant directly in front of him, and his reluctant men dallying behind. In front, down the valley and one hundred yards to the south, several hundred boys from southern Missouri, who had most likely never heard of an oyster, were loading their cannon for a torrential barrage. As the first bowling ball sized shells began to fall around my maternal Grandfather, spewing up divots of Antietam turf until the balls struck oystermen flesh, all in a moment – before he could think --- a cannon ball landed square on into the head of Grandfather’s Sergeant, bursting it like an overripe watermelon. A shard of skull bone flew back like shrapnel and lodged in Grandfather’s shoulder.


On that day, twenty thousand Americans lay dead or dying on the battlefield, the greatest mass blood letting on American soil, but my maternal Grandfather was fine. A trifle dazed, perhaps, and certainly shaken, but the fundamentals of his mind and spirit were sound.


He began to shake a week later, when he commenced the laborious task of reforming the unit. He hoped the tremors would lessen with time, but if anything they worsened, and he began to scream about a darkness coming over his eyes, and black out for a few minutes, at first, but eventually up to a half hour.


A doctor examined him and concluded that he wayward bone fragment lodged in a nerve in Grandfather’s shoulder, causing reduced blood flow to his upper body and brain, precipitating unpredictable spells of fainting. Poor hapless Granddaddy was subject to the shakes and blackouts the rest of his life.


He moved to Washington Heights, which was still rural after the Civil War and well into the beginning of the twentieth century. As apartment houses began to dot the landscape of northern Manhattan, enclosing his farm, he was always proud to say that he was the last man to have a woodshed on the island of Manhattan.


“Sometimes qualities skip a generation,” Mother told Homer, “but sometimes they don’t. But nothings to stop my Daddy’s good traits from appearing in you or your brother. I can see it now, just like you can see sprouts blossom on a fruit tree in spring.”


Mother always misjudged fundamentals. And from that erroneous foundation, set out on flights of fancy. It was left to us to heartlessly destroy her castles in the sky. We did it with aplomb.


When I saw our avenue the next day, that ancient tree gone.


One could also begin here:
 When I came home from the war, from my war, the Second World War, all I could do, after so many dislocations was to allow that drift, that stream of sober inevitability to hold endless sway. I let go the tension that had nearly ground my nerves to dust, and found the release after much hand wringing, such endless gnashing of my jaw, such incessant tossing between my sweat stained sheets. I let it go. I just let it all go! I had no Antietam, no sustained blood letting, but other fantastically generated birds of doom lurked in the trees, biding their time.


When I came home from the war long standing and hidden ills assumed an existence of their very own. They had become their own apotheosis – animated and alive. And the gravest symptom of this disease was that objects and symbols, usually so cleverly segregated, could no longer be so easily teased apart. My field of vision, customarily so acute in its depth, had become a blunt, ineffectual, unaccountably blearily.


One could also begin here:


There was another element of nagging concern. It is that extra shadow that I seem to possess like some inalienable birthright.


If flesh is heir to a thousand natural shocks, then my massive frame receives a double portion. A triple share, of unnatural confluences of shocks, of hits, of elements and infernal influences that seem to guide my errant life. It is as if, beyond my own limited sphere of somatic and psychic control, on the periphery of my meager consciousness, on that dark border zone were I end and it begins, there, there is the pocked and scarred battleground. And it is sly! And it is cunning! It is doggedly persistent in its attempts to encroach on my already faltering sense of self, to hurl its dark noose around the minute speck of quickly dimming light that I so generously label Langley, Langley Vandemark. Langley On the Mark!


Watch the dimming spark. Be wary of its trickster’s schemes. Why must every ray of celestial soul light that vaults from our single, solitary being be accompanied by an equal and opposite measure of the Shadow, that dark brother that creeps across the bright landscape of the psyche. The spoiler! The little tarty home wrecker! I play my cards, I have the good sportsmanship to lay down my hand for all to see, but It lays its hand, a hand full of cards that cancel my efforts, out beyond the border zone of perception. It blocks me. It limits my possible moves. All it knows how to do is how to step on feet, to betray, to negate, to…


But one could also begin here:


At other times it was as if the veil had been removed from my eyes. I saw events and circumstances as if a cloudy cataract had been suddenly burnt and purged away from my soul’s cornea.


When I came home from the war I cast a spell upon myself. What could be revealed was revealed. Where there were holes in my story, I simply let the cracks remain where they were. If streaming white light pulsed through the chinks, who was I to fill the gap? Not every chasm can be filled. Not every dull hole should be plugged.


One could also begin here:


Here is a gap, there is a white flash, and here, the bridge: my father’s family was actually black. Through some fortuitous selective breeding, re-locations, purposeful or accidental disruptions, my family had “passed” for white since the presidency of U.S. Grant or thereabouts. Actually, it’s hard to settle on an exact date when coal black faded to lily white. In my imagination there was never a clear boundary but a succession of wavering stages, fluttering through the generations, snaking upward, paling with each mile north of the Mason-Dixon Line, accumulating more money and power with each lighter gradation, with each lie, with each measure of forgetfulness.


I was stationed in Alabama just prior to my tour of duty in England. It was there that a creeping sensation of dread, a guilty moisture laden cloud which always hung over me seemed ready to downpour. My divided allegiances festered and seemed destined to leap frog backward and haunt me. I could sense it somewhere out beyond the perimeter fence along a tobacco road, in a shack inadequately shaded from the broiling sun by a scraggly tupelo tree, some long lost relative seemed destined to knock on my door. He would try, with a birthright as legitimate as any disrupted European royal line forced to live in exile, to reclaim one of his own; to rejoin a limb that had lopped itself off through artifice, deceit, and garden variety fear.


But no, that knock never came. But my theories seemed to confirm themselves when the first batch of “Colored” trooped were billeted adjacent to us, and I saw, with anxious eyes, that they were better than us. Our smug and superior stance, when measured and weighed alongside their selfless determination to be better than us through negation, was an unspoken accusation cast over  all. For me, slouching in my den of secrets, the pronouns them and we, had a peculiar permeability. So all seemed lost.  So much was gone…

CLUTTER: a novella

In 2001, when I was first fooling around with "serious" writing, I wrote a novella based on the Collyer  brothers, New York City's famous hoarding recluses.  Of course, their story is common New York lore.  So it came as no surprise to me that in the years following someone wrote a play  about the brothers called Clutter, and recently E.L. Doctorow wrote a novel called Homer and Langley.  This work has be chosen for next year's freshmen reading book (i.e., all Cornell freshmen read it).  So, here is my contribution to Collyer brother legend. It departs significantly from their story: there is the London Blitz, Gigantism, miscegenation, dips into loopy and not very serious post-modern moments of whimsey, and sundry depatures from narrative norms.  But all the while, it keeps its sense of proportion, which I hope you appreciate and enjoy

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"All men by nature love the senses irrespective of their utility, and predominantly above the rest, the sense of sight.”



- Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Book One.

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ONE

One may as well begin here:


When I came home from the war outside had become inside and inside had become outside. Emptiness had become clutter and clutter had become emptiness.


What went wrong, you would be justified to ask? The fault, it seems, was a mistake in apprehension. It was all so easily avoidable, but situations careened out of control; what should have been tidy became unkempt. What should have remained broad funneled into something narrow. The problem was not psychological, as many believed, but metaphysical; the problem was strictly taxonomic: it was about borders; it was about particulars and universals, matter and form, actuality and potentiality, being and becoming, change and the changeless. The problem was about what makes a thing a thing and what makes nothing nothing.


One may as well begin here.


“Why, they are twins Mrs. Vandemark!”


“What makes you think so, Mrs. Cavendish?”


“Well,” Mrs. Cavendish held us up for mutual inspection, one child perched in each of her plump arms. She screwed her face up with what was for her, no doubt, extraordinary concentration, “for all the usual reasons, I suppose.” Her eyes scanned from me to Homer and Homer to me rapidly, surveying possible features in common: casting a critical glance at eye color, hair texture, the comparative shape of our dumpling shaped neo-natal skulls. “Why,” she continued, “I would believe they are twins from the very fact that that Homer and Langley share the same nose!” As she said this, Mrs. Cavendish pointed her face to each of us, indicating which child was Homer and which was me.


“Mrs. Cavendish,” Mother beamed naturally, “that is Langley and that is Homer.”


“Oh, goodness gracious,” Mrs. Cavendish chuckled, as she handed me to mother. She kept Homer suspended on her wide hip like a grocery store parcel. “That just clinches it for me! They’re identical twins. Clyde, come over here and look at Mrs. Vandemark’s twins!”


Clyde Cavendish, who operated a newsstand down the street from our brownstone residence, was bundling up parcels of periodicals that had been delivered at the corner. He sauntered over to us and stood behind his portly wife. He clucked critically at her useless enthusiasms.


“Good morning, Mrs. Vandemark.” My Mother nodded in response. “What is the fresh fuss, Harriet?”


“Well,” she exhaled mightily, “you never told me that Mrs. Vandemark had twins?”


“I was just telling your wife, Mr. Cavendish…” Mother began but Mr. Cavendish interrupted her.


“Why Harriet, you silly bean, Homer was born a full year and a half after Langley.”


“Two years,” Mother corrected.


“Two years. There! I have to mind the stand, now. You mind your observations, Harriet. Good day, Mrs. Vandemark.” Clyde turned heel and with newspapers in his outstretched arms and returned the half block to his stand. Mrs. Cavendish’s face puckered.


“My husband can be such a prune sometimes,” was all Mrs. Cavendish managed to say. She held Homer up to her face, her features softening under the diffused stare of my baby brother. She made nonsensical noises and cooed only inches away from his fat baby face.


“I suppose,” she said, snapping back to an adult tone of voice, “I can see a difference in the eyes. Little Homer’s eyes don’t focus as well as Langley’s. So I suppose that shows that Langley is older.” Her disappointment was evident.


Mrs. Cavendish handed Homer back to Mother, who dutifully placed us both in the dual perambulator she and Father had recently purchased. She tucked me in first, wrapping a blue blanket that smelled mildly of peppermint and talcum powder around my baby torso; she then tucked Homer in the other chamber of the bicameral stroller, swaddling him in a yellow blanket. Pulling down the wind hood of the stroller about halfway to shelter us from the cool, early spring breeze, Mother wished Mrs. Cavendish a pleasant day, and resumed our stroll down Broadway.


As we rounded a corner near our brownstone, a city crew was preparing to fell an oak tree. Our block, at that bucolic time, was a pleasant, little trafficked side street, sheltered on both sides by mighty arboreal giants, their overhanging limbs forming a pleasant lattice of branches over the street, peppering the avenue with a broken field of green-lemon yellow light and deeper patches of dark forest green shade, all set in motion by a slight breeze, setting the street world in a flutter, a flurry of rustling, a changing, riotous checkerboard pattern of shifting lights and darks.


“Well look Homer, Langley, those men are taking that tree down.” Mother exclaimed, briefly stopping the perambulator at the curb.


“Why?” I asked.


“Well, its probably diseased,” she answered simply.


Several burly men in rolled up shirt sleeves and rough canvas work pants were affixing a massive metal ring, that really looked like an over-sized caliper, around the broad trunk of the oak and using that as a steady platform, running a metal ladder up the height of the monster to the first of the arm of thick cross branches.


My body, on that Edenic day, was in a drowsy, pleasant, supine posture. The workmen, with burly, bulging forearms, were manipulating the gleaming ring as one particularly adept worker climbed to the crown of the tree with a  saw. Mother swung the perambulator around, away from the scene of amputation, and closed the hood of the carriage, its black, thin, material stretched taut across the two lateral metal bars, like black crepe bunting around a coffin, and I dug deep in, hidden. And I should have remained hidden. But instead of shrinking from the world I grew outlandishly, quite literally large. Since that day, it seemed, the task of hiding myself become implausibly difficult. Somehow, someway, gigantism became my unalterable fate. Kicking my feet in the hidden pocket of the baby carriage, blind to the world around me, hiding on that day seemed all too real a possibility.


On that fine early spring day, nothing seemed amiss. The world was perfectly centered and poised like tiny bubbles of air in the liquid of a carpenter’s plain. The street, to my toddler’s malleable mind, the perfect escarpment for eternity to dwell. But in the midst of harmony I could hear the pleasant hiss of a metal saw cutting its jagged teeth through the dry, old growth wood.